National Bolshevism

National Bolshevism may be defined as a socialist movement that grounds itself, not in the internationalist, materialist, atheism of Marx, but rather in the traditional culture of the West. The call for the separation of socialism from its Marxist domination was most powerfully made by Oswald Spengler and he remains today the most important thinker of the National Bolshevik tendency. The dominance of Marxist thinking among members of the far left, as well as the acceptance of Marxism as being synonymous with socialism on the part of rightists, has obscured the fact that the genuine interests of the workers, and thus of socialists, might not be synonymous with internationalism, atheism, and social liberalism. In brief, a National Bolshevik program may be summarized as: Dirigism, Autarky, Socialism!

Down with Internationalism!

20 February, 2008

11 February, 2008

“We cannot have peace if we are only concerned with peace. War is not an accident. It is the logical outcome of a certain way of life. If we want to attack war, we have to attack that way of life.” — A.J. Muste

06 February, 2008

The diamond invention - the creation of the idea that diamonds are rare and valuable, and are essential signs of esteem - is a relatively recent development in the history of the diamond trade. Until the late nineteenth century, diamonds were found only in a few riverbeds in India and in the jungles of Brazil, and the entire world production of gem diamonds amounted to a few pounds a year. In 1870, however, huge diamond mines were discovered near the Orange River, in South Africa, where diamonds were soon being scooped out by the ton. Suddenly, the market was deluged with diamonds. The British financiers who had organized the South African mines quickly realized that their investment was endangered; diamonds had little intrinsic value - and their price depended almost entirely on their scarcity. The financiers feared that when new mines were developed in South Africa, diamonds would become at best only semiprecious gems.

The major investors in the diamond mines realized that they had no alternative but to merge their interests into a single entity that would be powerful enough to control production and perpetuate the illusion of scarcity of diamonds. The instrument they created, in 1888, was called De Beers Consolidated Mines, incorporated in South Africa. As De Beers took control of all aspects of the world diamond trade, it assumed many forms....

The diamond invention is far more than a monopoly for fixing diamond prices; it is a mechanism for converting tiny crystals of carbon into universally recognized tokens of wealth, power, and romance. To achieve this goal, De Beers had to control demand as well as supply. Both women and men had to be made to perceive diamonds not as marketable precious stones but as an inseparable part of courtship and married life. To stabilize the market, De Beers had to endow these stones with a sentiment that would inhibit the public from ever reselling them. The illusion had to be created that diamonds were forever - forever in the sense that they should never be resold.

This is one more example, of which there are many, of why this capitalist system has got to go!